Tag: Ramana

How do you create reality?

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

by Vic Shayne
author
Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

For many years I had read how we create our own reality. This was a great puzzle to me. Of course, it’s quite easy to repeat what others have said and then convince yourself that it’s true. This is called belief. Belief is not knowing; it is not a realization. You can believe that out of body experiences are real, but unless you have had one — or a thousand — then you don’t really know what it feels, looks, or sounds like. It remains an idea, but not a realization. You can also believe that life has a purpose, but it is only the mind that tells you this out of belief and not as a fact. And you can believe that you create your own reality, but unless you fully see this then it remains a belief.

Consciousness is the totality of all that is. It is existence at all levels, including all pairs of opposites that we call duality. Consciousness is a field of potential — what may or can happen — as well as the entire range of experiences, phenomena, expressions, and thoughts. The contents of consciousness is consciousness; it’s the whole enchilada, so to speak. And this totality is each one of us. It is as much in us as it is us. When we say that it is in us, this means the “us” of consciousness, and not the “us” of individual bodies, minds, and brains.

The two faces of human beings
We can look at the person in two ways. One way is how most people understand themselves, because it is the default. When the mind is conditioned by authority figures, parents, teachers, relatives, and all sorts of information and ideas, the egoic self is formed. This self believes that it is a body and all that is identified with the body — ideas, memories, relatives, friends, possessions, talents, and so on. The egoic self is just a belief, because it is temporal and it is changeable. The other way to regard a person is as an expression of consciousness. Consciousness is the natural state of being, while the egoic self is artificial and created out of belief. Consciousness is the whole, and the egoic self is a fragmented worldview of the self and all others.

Everything is consciousness, and because we are all consciousness then we know of all of the dualities of hot and cold, good and bad, caring and uncaring, smart and stupid, loud and quiet, tall and short, wild and controlled, chaotic and ordered, and so on. As Freud said, there is a part of the mind that is our face to the world that we want others to see us as. We have a real “us,” but we don’t want others to know this is what we are, and this includes all of the bad, negative, and unseemly aspects of consciousness. Freud called this moral and ethical face to the world the Superego.

The writer creates reality
When a writer creates a book, a play, or a movie, she taps into the totality of consciousness that lies within her — as her. If she remains in the egoic state of the individual self, then she cannot create reality, because the egoic state is limited to itself and not the totality of existence and thought.

A writer can create terrible and cruel villains, heroic protagonists, characters that hold secret flaws or inclinations, slimy creatures, evil sociopaths, and altruistic sages. The entire breadth of potential behavior, mindsets, and actions is at the writer’s disposal. Why? Because all of these are in consciousness, which means that they are with her. And it’s a bold thing to write cruel characters who lack compassion and are apt to be destructive. It’s bold because it is an admission that such characteristics are within the writer. But because they are in all of us, as the audience we become involved in the story and find it believable, even if it’s science fiction. It only needs to be written realistically in order to have this effect. In essence, the writer is creating reality, and when we sit in the theater watching all of her characters, the action, and the scenery, we are experiencing the writer’s reality.

As consciousness, we all are the creators of our own reality, each and every waking moment, as well as in every moment of a dream or daydream. Can you see this? Don’t take my word for it; look into this. And when you look into it, consider that all of the good, bad, and indifferent are within you — not you as an individual, egoic self, but rather “you” as the totality of consciousness.

Delving deep into consciousness in my new book

When I wrote Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience, I knew I was jumping into turbulent waters, because there is such a huge divide between materialist science and spirituality. Strangely, as I discovered in the process of writing, both religious people and materialist scientists base their opinions about spirituality on beliefs. This is a hard pill to swallow, because both ends of the spectrum swear that they are right and that they have the answers to life’s questions, including what consciousness is. But it turns out that a belief is a belief, and this is what shapes most people’s opinions and actions.

Consciousness isn’t a book for everyone, because it’s quite honest in its approach to who we are and why we see the world in our own unique ways. Honesty does not sit well with the egoic sense of self. This egoic mind, or persona, has been conditioned since birth to believe it is a body and all of the attachments and identities that go along with it. In essence, people are not who they take themselves to be — they are amalgams of thoughts that are unreliable, ephemeral, and changeable.

But, trust me, this book is easier reading than it looks!

In Consciousness, I discuss all sorts of ideas of what consciousness is, according to the experts who ironically really do not know very much outside of their own guesses and iffy conclusions, whether they are scientists or self-proclaimed New Age experts. If you are alive, you are experiencing consciousness.

This book also dives into the many experiences in consciousness — near death and out of body experiences, dreaming, lucid dreaming, intuition, hallucinogenic trips, imagination, quantum entanglement, and more.

It’s so easy that it’s hard
So how do you get to the bottom of what consciousness is? The answer is so easy that it is mostly overlooked. In addition to my experience with many years of self-enquiry meditation, I turned to some of the most respected and profound teachers who have realized their own natures by waking up to what they are not. That’s right, what they are not. This means that we all have the ability to observe our own state of being and see where thoughts come from, how they rise and fall, and how they accrete to form a sense of self.

A number of gurus have taught about finding one’s true nature as consciousness down through the ages, from Buddha to Rumi, and from Jiddu Krishnamurti to Ramana Maharshi. These individuals have all said the same thing: You cannot rely on information, teachings, rituals, religion, ideas, thinking, or practice to realize consciousness; you just have to observe with great persistence, desire, and interest, and eventually it dawns on you who you are.

If you are too tied to your beliefs about who you are, as well as the teachings of New Age philosophy, religion, or materialist science, then this book isn’t for you. But if you want to understand yourself at the deepest level and are willing to let go of your preconceptions and suppositions, then buy the book and investigate into your own nature. It’s quite rewarding if you can do it.

Happy reading!

#neardeathexperiences #outofbodyexperiences #dreams #quantumentanglement

Find out who you really are, beyond your mind

Last year I published two books about the mind and how it creates stress, happiness, illness, and health. The books are Stressing Out Over Happiness, and The Guidebook to Stress, Meditation and Happiness. My goal is to go far past the subject of the mind. This is why I wrote my latest book, 13 Thirteen Pillars of Enlightenment, which is a novel about self-realization and enlightenment. This book will take you on a journey into the mind as that which we call “I,” or the self, and then far beyond. It took me more than 60 years of research and a year to write this book.

This new work is a short narrative that leads you to find the most mysterious and illusive aspect of life throughout the ages. It’s been called self realization, enlightenment, or realizing your true nature. Nonetheless these terms are relatively meaningless and can only point to what exists behind that which we call the mind, body, and reality. So I am hoping that this book can point you toward your own experience if that’s what you desire.

My personal journey over many years led me to this realization, and my goal is to share the most fundamental tenets related to enlightenment. In the book I also go into the problem of language in trying to shed light on something that is beyond language, concepts, and images. Ultimately, I hope that you will be able to find out for yourself where thoughts come from, how they form the mind and the world that seems to exist, and how to discover the true nature of the Self.